Question about what would be necessary to maintain the DSpace XOAI project

[alex buckley]

Hi DSpace community,

We have a VuFind site that is harvesting from a DSpace 7.x instance (via OAI-PMH). VuFind is harvesting using the XOAI metadata format.

We are using the XOAI metadata format, because it exposes metadata fields, plus bitstream URLS - both of which are required in our VuFind use case.

We see that XOAI 4.x is not actively maintained ( https://github.com/DSpace/xoai ) and that DSpace itself still uses XOAI v3 and has yet to prioritise an upgrade to the latest version of XOAI.

We were wondering, can anyone please shed some light on what would be required (both in terms of tasks to be done and level of resources) to maintain the DSpace/XOAI project?

This way we can determine if we are able to contribute, or if it is better for us to shift our DSpace harvesting approach.

Any insights would be very much appreciated.

Kind regards

Alex

[DSpace Developers]

Hi Alex,

There might be a misunderstanding in your question, so I wanted to clarify a few points:

• DSpace still uses XOAI 3.x.  This 3.x version of XOAI is supported by DSpace developers, as DSpace uses it in all production installations which have the OAI-PMH interface enabled.  There are no plans to replace it at this time.
• XOAI 4.x is lacking support at this time because DSpace doesn't use it. 

Essentially, XOAI version 4.x was built by the original developer as a major refactor of XOAI 3.x.  Shortly after that refactor, the original developer then had to abandon all support for all versions of XOAI (as he was no longer able to support it himself as he'd moved on to a new job/position).  Since DSpace depended heavily on XOAI version 3.x, we offered to "adopt" XOAI.  However, since DSpace has never used XOAI version 4.x, we have no way to support it ourselves.

At this time, DSpace has no priority on upgrading to XOAI version 4.x, as it'd be a major effort without clear major benefits.  In other words, we're perfectly happy with XOAI version 3.x at this time, and we continue to maintain it when we find bugs/issues in 3.x (the most recent release was about a year ago: https://github.com/DSpace/xoai/releases/tag/xoai-3.4.0)

So, to your question... there's really no additional effort required to maintain XOAI version 3.x (as DSpace developers are already doing so).  

However, I cannot comment on the effort required to maintain XOAI version 4.x, because DSpace has no experience with that version.  I'm also not certain of the effort required to upgrade DSpace from XOAI version 3 to version 4.  We had a very old ticket about this at https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/5956 , but it was closed because the original developer of XOAI was unable to find time for it, and we never found interest from anyone else. 

I'm not sure if that explanation helps, but essentially there's no plans for DSpace to abandon XOAI version 3.x.  But there are similarly no plans to upgrade to XOAI version 4, until we find a clear reason to prioritize that upgrade (and also find a volunteer or a funder to help us achieve it).

Tim

[alex buckley]

Hi Tim,

Thank you very much for your response that is very helpful and appreciated.

I think that has answered all our questions for now.

Thanks again,

Alex

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